Dysarthria Case Study

This woman presents with a moderately-severe dysarthria, with 85% intelligibility in known contexts and 80% intelligibility in unknown contexts. Primary characteristics of the dysarthria are forced audible inspiration, forced inspiration-expiration, strained-strangled voice, voice stoppages, imprecise consonants, inappropriate silence, and slow rate. The client’s overall intelligibility was not greatly affected, since her single word and phrase productions were understood by the listener. Although the client presents with a moderately-severe dysarthria, with 80-85% intelligibility, her naturalness and comprehensibility are tremendously reduced, due to deficits in the various subsystems for speech and observable neurological deficits contributing to her dysarthria. The woman demonstrates a lack of facial expression, volitional, postural, and muscular deficits at

These deficits may be attributed to reduced vital capacity and subglottal air pressure, deficits in laryngeal function, control of the respiratory and phonatory subsystem, and possibly attributed to the client’s abnormal postural control, as observed throughout known and unknown contents. During the Diadochokinetic (DDK) task, the client demonstrated alternating loudness variations after she was provided with a model and instructions (i.e., “repeat fast and steady”). Additionally, during a sustained phonation task of the vowel /a/, the client was provided instructions to hold and sustain the vowel (i.e., “take a breath and say /a/, hold that out for long and steadily as you can”) which also revealed alternating loudness variations, and a strained-strangles voice. Her maximum phonation time (MPT) was 13 seconds, which could signify respiratory and phonatory